Question: If someone tried, could they teach a monkey to behave like a human, i.e. speak?

Lewis Dean answered on 8 Mar 2014:

Speaking is a very interesting thing. It takes a really special voice box (the thing in your windpipe that makes all the sounds when you speak), only humans have a voice box that lets us speak words.

However, back in the 1960’s and 1970’s there were some experiments to try to teach young chimps to use sign language. Some chimps did fairly well with learning words, but they didn’t do very well with what order to put the words in!

That might sound silly, but the order that we use words is very important. If I say ‘I give you a present’ it means something very different to ‘You give me a present’.